Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“I don’t know.” He speaks so quietly she can barely hear him.

“If he gives that to someone, someone who remembers your little habits — I swear I don’t know what gets into you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m really—”

She doesn’t hear the rest. She steps out of the room, closes the door and slips the lock on. Her son is standing there, by the washer and dryer.

“He’ll be the death of me,” his mother says. “What are you doing here?”

“I think the detective might be getting close.”

His mother nods. “I get the sense he doesn’t give up easy.”

“But this is good,” the son says. “I’m going to drop everything for a while. Indefinitely, I guess, while I see where he goes.”

“We need a contingency plan,” she says, and lowers her voice to a whisper. “If the girl, and the kid, show up on their own, before Weaver finds them, we need to be ready. We need to be able to deny everything. We need to be able to show the kid up as a liar. We say we don’t know what he’s talking about.”

The son leans against the washing machine, folds his arms across his chest and shakes his head. “You’re talking about moving Dad?”

The woman hesitates. “I guess you could say that.”

“Where would we move him? Where could he go where we could still look after him?”

His mother says nothing. Her silence speaks volumes.

“No, Mother. We can’t do that.”

“I can’t keep this up,” she says. “I just can’t.”

“Look, just let me see how this plays out with Weaver. If we’re going to have to get rid of anybody, I’d rather it was him and the others, not Dad.”

“Of course,” she says. “That goes without saying.”

“That Weaver guy, God, he’s as big a pain in the ass as his kid was. At least everything worked out the way it should have with him.”

Driving over to the Skillings’, imagining what they had to be going through with their son, I flashed back to when Scott was only six years old, years before our troubles began.

Around that time, he’d been having a lot of nightmares, and he was coming into our room in the middle of the night.

“I had a scary dream,” he’d say each time. Donna and I would allow him to crawl into the bed with us, but we worried we were establishing bad precedents, being too soft, that he’d be snuggling with us every night until he left for college.

But it was something we decided we would worry about later, and looking back now, I’m glad we let him slide in between us, pull the covers up to his neck, and drop his head into the chasm between our pillows.

One night, I was the one with the nightmare. It was a recurring one, one I still get every once in a while. In it, I’m slamming that drunk driver’s head into the hood of the car. I’ve got a fistful of his hair, a good strong grip, and I’m banging his head again and again and again until it becomes apparent that it is no longer attached to his body. I realize what I’ve done and turn his dismembered head around so that I’m looking him right in the eye.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” he says, and grins. “Have you learned yours?”

I always woke up in a cold sweat. This particular night, I did not wake Donna up tossing and turning or, as I sometimes did, screaming. I was afraid to try to go back to sleep for fear of seeing that head again, so I slipped out from under the covers and went down to the kitchen. I ran myself some water from the tap and sat there at the table, thinking about the mistakes I’d made, about how we’d ended up in Griffon.

I’d been sitting there maybe ten minutes when I realized I was being watched. Scott was standing in the doorway, and my heart did a flip. I tried not to show that he’d nearly scared me to death.

“What are you doing up?” I asked.

“I could see a light on,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be wandering around the house at night.”

“What are you doing?” Scott asked.

“Just sittin’ here.”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

I hesitated. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“What was it about?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

He nodded. “Are you scared if you go back to bed it’ll start again?”

“A little.”

He gave that some thought for a few seconds. Finally, he proposed a solution. “You can come sleep with me.”

I had a sip of water, put the glass down. “Okay,” I said.

He waited while I put my glass in the sink and turned out the light. He reached for my hand and led me to his room as though I didn’t know how to get there.

His bed was a single. I lay on my side, my back up against the wall. Scott got in and tucked himself up against me.

“Don’t snore,” he said. “You snore a lot.”

“I’ll try not to.”

He was back asleep in seconds. I felt his body swell and shrink with each breath. Anticipating his rhythms calmed me. Before long I was asleep, too, and at least for the rest of that one night, the bad dreams were absent.

Once again, I found myself sitting in the Skillings’ living room. Adam and Sheila were settled in chairs across from me. I was on the couch. On the table between us was coffee, which Sheila must have started making the moment she’d hung up the phone with me. Steam rose as she poured some into a china cup.

“Cream? Sugar?” she asked, hovering. It was right there in front of me. As were some cookies. Sometimes, in times of extreme stress, you had to do something to keep yourself occupied. Make coffee. Bake cookies. Clean out a closet.

“For God’s sake, he can spoon in his own sugar,” Adam Skilling snapped.

Sheila promptly sat down, put her hand over her mouth and pressed hard, as though trying to hold a scream inside.

“Mr. Weaver,” Adam said, “our son, he can be a bit of an idiot at times, like all kids his age, but he didn’t kill Hanna.”

“Tell me what’s happened,” I said.

Shortly after I had left him, Sean called his parents from the bridge where we’d found Hanna’s body, and they immediately drove over. Ramsey and Quinn — the Skillings had made a note of the names on their badges — were still attempting to question him, but it seems he’d taken my advice and was keeping his mouth shut.

About six hours later, as the Skillings were getting up for the day — not that anyone had gotten any sleep — Sheila noticed the police were outside, poking around Sean’s Ranger. They had the doors open, and were searching inside.

“Were these the same police who’d been interviewing Sean the night before?”

Sheila had managed to tamp down that scream hiding in her throat, removed her hand from her mouth, and said, “They were different. Two men, instead of a man and a woman.”

“Did you get their names?”

“One was...” She paused. “One was named Haines and—”

Adam interjected. “Brindle, that was the other one.”

“How’d they get into the truck?” I asked.

“Sean must have left it unlocked,” Adam said. “When you were here, and we ordered him home, he ran into the house so fast he probably didn’t think to lock it.”

“So it had been sitting unlocked all night?” I asked.

The two of them glanced at each other, then looked at me and nodded. “Probably,” Adam said.

“So you saw them out there. Then what happened?”

Sheila said, “I ran into Sean’s room to tell him. He was in bed, but he wasn’t sleeping. He ran out — he was only in his boxers — and I ran after him, in my housecoat. Adam was already outside — he’s dressed and ready for the day before the rest of us.”